What lies beneath (and Henry Moore at Tate Britain)
By Max Leonard, le cool London
London’s “secret” tube station, West Ashfield, is not one of the several dozen abandoned tube stations, marking obscure branch lines or places (North End, York Road, Down Street) no longer important enough to merit their own stop. It is, instead, a fake tube station used for training, perched on the third floor of a London Underground building in West Kensington. As such, it is quintessentially London, which is a city characterised by strange inversions and returns, and things being where they should not be.
Sometimes it’s the subterranean erupting into the open, as with a property developer’s bid to restore one of London’s lost rivers to its original course. The Tyburn was buttressed and repressed into Victorian culverts and sewers, though where it does surface people fish for trout, and its restoration would create a newly riverine South Molton Street. A small impediment: Buckingham Palace also stands in its way.
But it’s when everyday life is forced underground that is most intriguing, as proved at Tate Britain’s Henry Moore exhibition, which is now entering its final weeks. Forget his familiar, doughy large-scale sculptures and focus instead on the small, ink, watercolour and wax crayon drawings he made during the Second World War. Moore’s studio was bombed in 1939, leaving him unable to create sculpture, so, as an official war artist, he would descend into the Tube system with London’s working classes, who did not have private air raid shelters, and recorded the pitiful, harrowing scenes he saw. At some, such as Clapham North Deep Shelter, up to 12,000 people would sleep nightly. At others, such as the Aldwych, people would sleep huddled together on the tracks. In Moore’s powerful, elemental images, a dark, troglodytic London emerges. As the original 1941 exhibition panel said, it is ‘a terrifying vista of recumbent shapes, pale as all underground life tends to be pale; regimented, as only fear can regiment; helpless yet tense, safe yet listening, uncouth, uprooted, waiting in the tunnel for the dawn to release them. This is not the descriptive journalism of art. It is imaginative poetry of a high order.’
Henry Moore is at Tate Britain, Millbank, until August 8.
tate.org.uk
Photo credit: Children outside air raid shelter, Gresford.
